Seori stood across the war table with her palms braced on obsidian, eyes moving over the map we’d carved into blackglass during a quieter season, when we still believed quiet was a thing you could keep. Rivers were thin silver veins. Passes scored the mountains like healed wounds. Tiny pieces—onyx for us, citrine for the fae—marked encampments in a constellation no one wanted to see.
Her face was calm. Too calm. I know her now. Stillness, on her, is not peace; it’s the eye she makes for herself in the middle of the storm.
“She’s in pain,” I said, not loud enough to be strategy.
Seori’s gaze lifted. She didn’t ask who. She rarely needs to.
“She hides it well,” she answered, and the smallest muscle in her jaw flickered—one of the ways her heart speaks when her mouth refuses.
Yuna. Taeyang. The thread between them was singing itself raw. Each morning I’d catch Seori looking west, as if sheer will could bend horizon into messenger. Each night, when she thought I slept, she would hold her quiet in both hands like a cup too hot to set down.
I wanted to be angry at Taeyang for the ache he’d taught Yuna to carry. But we were children of blood and burden. I knew too much about fear to throw stones at a man who mistook leaving for protection.
Bootsteps sounded at the door; Jisoo entered, Minji close behind. They walked like people who had memorized eachother’s steps and were trying to forget them at the same time. Another fracture in a circle that used to be seamless.
“How bad?” I asked.
Jisoo laid a sealed scroll beside the map. His jaw was set so tight the hinge creaked. “Border sentries caught two fae scouts near the Ashgate perimeter an hour before dawn. Not hostile. Testing. Counting paces. They let themselves be seen.”
“So they’re preparing,” I said.
“Or panicking,” Minji offered. Her voice was soft, but it carried in the way soft things do when you’ve learned to listen. “The Summer Court must know something we don’t.”
Seori’s hand skated to the western ridgeline and paused over the stylized thorn we’d etched for the fae gate.
“My Father wouldn’t move the court without reason,” she said, mouth flattening aroundmother. “Not unless—”
“Not unless they feel threatened by their daughter’s bond to a demon,” I finished, because naming a thing is sometimes the only control you get.
There it was. The truth none of us wanted: Yuna’s name on the Summer Court’s breath, Taeyang’s burning beside it, our war map suddenly holding a heartbeat that didn’t belong to battle.
“If we move first,” Seori said, fingers resettling on the table’s edge, “we confirm their fear. We become the monsters their story needs.”
“If we wait,” I said, heat climbing my spine, “the first blood belongs to us anyway—ours or theirs.”
The room went still. Not empty—just thick with the kind of quiet that precedes a bruise. I remember another silence likethat: the night before my mother died, the palace breathing once and holding it like a secret. I was too young to understand why the candles refused to gutter, why the dogs wouldn’t sleep. Morning taught me.
“I won’t build another war on fear,” I said. My voice came out steady; it surprised me by sounding like a vow. “I have buried enough bones beneath it.”
Minji nodded, grief bright in her eyes—grief for people who were not dead yet, grief for the work she knew her hands would do if we failed. Jisoo didn’t look at her. Coward, part of me thought. Surviving, another part answered, because I’m cruel to other men when I see my own old habits in them.
We needed every weapon we had. Weapons aren’t always steel.
“Orders,” I said, and the table’s edge felt less like a cliff. “We ride at first light to the High Summit under white pennons. A parley, not a performance. Two escorts each, no glamour, no compulsion, no memory work. Weapons peace-bonded. Wards set to sing if anyone breathes a lie.”
Seori’s eyes warmed; the approval wasn’t a reward so much as a reminder that I have learned to live in rooms that aren’t on fire. “Terms to draft,” she murmured, already reaching for ink. “I’ll bind the clauses to the paper. The page will burn before it lets them break it.”
I pointed to the map.
“Ravenhorn Legion will hold Ashgate Pass at a distance—flags furled, bows unstrung, shields ready. No arrow loosed unless a red flare goes up. Captain Sora will see to it.” I traced east. “Ashwalkers on civilian routes. Move families out of the valleys into the inner wards. Quietly. No panic.”
Minji set her palm to the southern flats, where the ground is kind enough to be a field hospital. “I’ll raise tents at Ember Meadow,” she said. “Three lines of care. I have a draft for blood-mending that won’t scorch demon marrow. And…” Her eyes flicked to Seori. “I’ll lay an illusion lattice to make the meadow look empty if scouts crest the ridge.”
“Good,” I said. “Spymaster Kade will confirm movement from Taeyang’s uncles. I want to know which banners they’ve paid and where they mean to place the knife. If the fae court is pulling them by the chain, I want to see the hand.”
Jisoo cleared his throat. “Shadeguard will sweep the old tunnels under the High Summit. If the court tries to open a gate beneath us, we collapse it. No one vanishes off a cliff they didn’t choose.”
His voice didn’t tremble. His mouth did. I almost told him to look at Minji when he spoke to her with his hands like that—orders that tucked themselves around her safety without daring to touch her name. I didn’t. Some truths learned under war belong to quieter rooms.
